Re: Aunt Tillie builds a kernel (was Re: ISA hardware discovery -- the elegant solution)

["Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>]

Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>:
> > "Crap." Melvin thinks.  "I don't remember what kind of network card I
> > compiled in.  Am I going to have to open this puppy up just to eyeball
> > the hardware?" Doing that would take time Melvin was planning to spend
> 
> So he builds a kernel with modular setups just like the vendor kernel. The
> existing module configuration and setup data that worked with the old
> kernel keeps working and he has time to read up on his technique and get
> laid.

Where did your assumption that Melvin has the canned config files to
do that still available come from?  More fundamentally: which should 
he *have* to have those configs available?
 
> I just don't buy your examples. Eric all I can think is that you
> have seriously weird relatives.

Correct.  My relatives are *much* weirder than Melvin and Tillie :-).
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence
of the improbable...A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or
never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a
mere ass: he is actually ill.	-- H. L. Mencken